How to Get Binance API Prices in Python at a Precise Time?

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Problem Formulation

Say, you want to get the current price of a cryptocurrency using Python’s inofficial binance API. How do you do this for a precise point in time?

Step 1: Install Python Binance with pip

If you haven’t already, install the Python Binance API using the pip package manager. Run pip install python-binance in your command line, shell, or terminal. You will use this library to connect to the Binance API and access data such as the price data you seek.

$ pip install python-binance

Step 2: Register with Binance

You need to have an account with Binance or you won’t be able to connect to the Binance API. You can create an account here.

Step 3: Generate a Binance API Key

An API Key allows you to connect with Binance’s data set. It defines and restricts the permissions you have. For example, Binance may decide to give you a certain quota based on your access rights.

An API Secret, also referred to as API Private Key is a password used in combination with the API Key.

You can learn more about Binance API keys here.

Step 4: Create a Client Object

The Client object serves as an access point to the Binance API. It wraps all the complexity needed to communicate with the Binance servers and actually issuing the requests to their servers. You create the Client object once by passing your API key and your API secret in the constructor (I should say, initialization) method. After creation, you can simply call methods on the method to perform all kinds of requests such as getting price data on certain cryptocurrencies.

Here’s how you can create a Client object in your Python script:

client = Client(api_key, api_secret)

Step 5: Get the Historical Price Data using client.get_historical_klines()

The Binance API will retrieve “klines” or “candlestick” data for you if you call the method client.get_historical_klines().

  • The first argument is the pair of assets you need. For example, to get the price data from Ethereum to Bitcoin, you’d pass the string “ETHBTC” into it. I’ll give you a list of common crypto abbreviations at the end of this article.
  • The second argument is the time interval you seek price data for. There are several predefined interval attribute in the Client object. For example, Client.KLINE_INTERVAL_1MINUTE will return an interval size of 1-minute chunks.
  • The third and optional fourth arguments give you a way to specify the duration of the data you seek. For example, "1 day ago UTC" will give you yesterday’s price data.

Here’s an example code snippet drawn from the documentation:

# fetch 1 minute klines for the last day up until now
klines = client.get_historical_klines("BNBBTC", Client.KLINE_INTERVAL_1MINUTE, "1 day ago UTC")

# fetch 30 minute klines for the last month of 2017
klines = client.get_historical_klines("ETHBTC", Client.KLINE_INTERVAL_30MINUTE, "1 Dec, 2017", "1 Jan, 2018")

# fetch weekly klines since it listed
klines = client.get_historical_klines("NEOBTC", Client.KLINE_INTERVAL_1WEEK, "1 Jan, 2017")

These are some possible crypto asset abbreviations you may need:

  • BCH – Bitcoin Cash
  • BTC – Bitcoin
  • DASH – Dash
  • DOGE – Dogecoin
  • ETC – Ethereum Classic
  • ETH – Ether (also known as Ethereum)
  • LTC – Litecoin
  • NEO – Neo
  • NMC – Namecoin
  • Nxt – NXT
  • POT – PotCoin
  • PPC – Peercoin
  • USDC – USD Coin (stablecoin)
  • USDT – Tether
  • XMR – Monero
  • XRP – Ripple

You can find more in this article.

Where to Go From Here?

Enough theory. Let’s get some practice!

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